Hippety Hoppety

But with one thing and another, this week has been holy days and today is a holiday for most of you — and me (yes, most of me. Look, guys, I’m a writer. I work by committee. Like you think I’m alone in my head!)

It’s time to stuff your face

And spend time with friends and family, even those really odd looking relatives

I’m going to be writing too, of course, (a writer relaxes by writing) but I’m going to be more or less away from the net most of the day.

So you guys go and have fun

And don’t forget to eat the flowers!

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it, and I’m out a here! (But we’ll be back tomorrow!)

I’ve read Germany/Central Europe (rabbit from local tradition and eggs from Greek Christianity/pagan tradition) but Australia makes as much sense as anything. I mean, their giant rabbits have entire built in pouches for eggs-n-stuff!

You’re on the right tract– the hare because it gave birth at the right time, thus symbol of life.

Eggs were just another symbol of life and renewal, so they got shoved together.

It’s kind of like Christmas Lights being colorful– you go from having an ever-green tree for life, to decorating it, to putting fire on it, to having little twinkly lights you can put on it, so you can make them into non-fire colors, and eventually you end up with a brilliant blue lights on a pink plastic Christmas tree!

Yes, eggs and spring go together too. Doesn’t come immediately to my mind because here the birds are just starting to get noisy, will be a few more weeks before we get to the eggs. But because I’m out during the nights and early mornings I’ve been watching the city hares being amorous for a while now. 🙂

I know that they had lots of eggs at the Easter because they gave them up for Lent, and I know there was a tradition at *mumble* to dye eggs red for Christmas… betcha that crocus, or some other egg-looking flower in bright colors, was involved in the first lady that went “I’m going to dye eggs for Easter, too!”

Oh, gads… made the mistake of clicking on Bing’s “Where did Easter Eggs come from” link. (or maybe it was Easter Bunny)

First several links were a lot of hoo-ha that I debunked at
catholicstand.com/conspiracies-catholicism-easter-special/
and the first one to offer decent information was the history dot com’s topics/holidays/history-of-easter article, which isn’t even focused on the topic.

The only proper Christmas tree is a fir, either noble or alpine, although spruce is an acceptable substitute if you have small kids. Just be warned the spruce will only have half as many ornaments on it, but they will all stay on it, even with youngun’s running around.

You have a plastic Christmas tree, and you are trying to call ME a town kid?!

The reason you had junipers growing up is because you lived in a freakin’ desert and they were the only thing available, or anything else was too rare to cut down. Sure they smell good, but you use them or cedar on your wreath and get the same smell, and they are all crooked and have flimsy tips to hang ornaments on, not to mention the floppy top.

Firs won’t lose a needle if you water them, at least not for a month and a half or more. Besides you can buy alpines balled in burlap from me and plant them after you are done using them as a Christmas tree. 🙂

At least you aren’t advocating those ridiculous road cone, nursery grown, ‘shaped’ Christmas trees that are so thick there is no place to hang the ornaments or lights.

The plastic tree cost about as much as a bought tree of the same size, and we can use it for years. I can set it up about the same time we start the Advent Calenders– just like the juniper– and keep it up until the 12 days are over, without issue, just like the juniper.

It’s pretty.

And yeah, we had juniper because you didn’t want to waste a good tree– but that holds even on the damp side. I shudder inside at how many folks throw away good firewood just because it use to be a Christmas tree.

My grandma, though– being Scottish and all– she beat the band for the best Christmas tree.

She bought a little pine tree ONCE. In a pot. And that was the Christmas Tree from well before I was born until the year she died. It probably cost less than my lights.

We grew Douglas Firs. For timber, but as we had new plantings starting to get above the weeds, when I was a kid, I’d go out and do a rough shaping on trees that were close to the road or too close to other trees and would have to come out anyways. I’d go out on a weekend with a machete and “do the round” and trim them to a rough tree shape while I was limbing up the other trees. When they got to big to use (we had an 8′ ceiling) we’d cut them down. I’d try to keep some of differing ages so we had trees for future Christmases’s. They weren’t as filled in as the commercial trees, but they were better than the straggly ones we used to get before I’d do shaping.
My step-brother, the logger who liked to top trees, would take the top off of trees he was falling ’cause he thought they were the best shape.
My Dad for a number of years interplanted Knobcone x Monterrey pine hybrids (KMX) where the Douglas Fir wouldn’t grow. One year he decided he might as well use one as a Christmas tree. He found out when it got into the house it thought it was Spring and started shedding pollen – which turned out to give him hay-fever.
He tossed it out and went and got another tree.
I haven’t had a tree in over 20 years for myself. Dad, I don’t think, has had one in ten.

Yeah — I found out I got migraines when we had real Christmas trees when I was first married. I didn’t notice it in Portugal because I lived in the middle of pine woods — and had migraines all the time. SO. Now we live in CO. No migraines.

I dunno, when one lives in a tropical country, one does the best one can – the plastic tree may be slightly less messy and can be reused, but I do miss having a real tree.

Though, I remember when I was a wee tot, we had a little tree made of little pine cones.

I do remember the first time we had Christmas in East Berlin though. Dad was busy at work, and didn’t have time to go buy a Christmas tree. There was someone selling trees on the 2-3 or so km walk home from school. I had the pocket money for a 2m tall tree. The guy selling looked rather taken aback when my best friend and I hoisted the tree onto our shoulders and walked away – two seven year old girls trekking through the snow, with the requisite heavy leather schoolbags, with a tree on our shoulders, chatting as we walked. My mother was shocked when we got home, and stuffed my friend and I full of hot cocoa bought from the West side, and sent M home with tins of Danish biscuits.

I can still remember the smell of the tree and the crisp snow-scent in the air. I remember it being as black as midnight, with fat fluffy clumps of snow drifting down.

Nowadays the government (BLM arm) is single-handedly killing the small ranchers so meat will go through the roof this year (gov killed a third of Bundy’s cattle and buried it on Bundy’s land– as well as broke two cisterns filled with water ON Bundy’s land)

well it was also thought to be good for you. A Renaissance writer, discussing ordinary vs. extraordinary care, said that you could go on eating eggs and other such cheap and easy to obtain foods, instead of chicken or pheasant and other such expensive and hard to get foods, even if a doctor prescribed them.

That’s why they used to commercially hunt Ducks too. They used to use flat boats with a 4 gauge (!!!) shotgun mounted to the prow and shoot flocks of them on the water to supply the local grocer. True sportsmen do not shoot ducks on the water.

Chicken apparently used to be EXPENSIVE. More expensive than the other meats.

Hence the famous “… a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” promise. Made by (sigh) the freakin’ Republican party during the 1928 Herbert Hoover campaign. (We’ve been dealing with this whole “the gubmint can provide for your every need” nonsense for a long time, folks.)

Growing up, my mom would buy the “cheap” batches of laying breeds– 95%+ male, at pennies on the dollar.

At one point we butchered over 100 chickens a weekend, with hotsprings to help in getting the feathers off. Gave away most of them, but ate a ton.

If they’re expensive enough to AI, there’s a method of gravity-sorting the sperm so that you AI the females and (in cows) 95% of the calves are female. (Resulted in a glut of dairy cows.,. five ten years back?)

Am I right in thinking that “veal” originally was a byproduct of dairying? Your bull calves consumed milk that was marketable, and the only use for them otherwise would be to raise them up for oxen or for steaks. And Oxen tend to be tough and fattening steers uses fodder that could otherwise be used for feeding cows to make more milk. So butchering them young was the best use of resources?

I don’t know if that’s original, but I know from one of the current Navy suppliers that it is now a by-product of dairies.

I, as a purely personal choice, don’t eat veal. To paraphrase mom (note: my folks are together and healthy, but mom talks more– thus, most everything is “mom says”) I spent too dang much time keeping them alive to eat the @#$@# things.

I’ve only seen oxen at the county fair in Okanogan.

Mom has mentioned that a few idiots would do PETA fodder type things like just killing the calves of dairy cows, but that they were all rich idiots. You have to be rich to throw away money like that.

I don’t know, when I worked on a dairy farm we would give away bull calves, except the one or two raised as steers every year to butcher, and an occasional replacement bull raised. Of course we had Jersey’s and it is difficult to even GIVE Jersey bull calves away.

As I understand it, my husband’s family always raised a steer to butcher, but every time it was about ready, one of the old dairy cows would get sick, and have to be butchered, so they ended up eating the tough old cow, and selling the young tasty steer.

My father-in-law also always would have a line he said, either, “We’re poor today, we’re eating steak,” or “We’re rich today, we’re eating hot dogs.” depending on the circumstances.

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 5:47 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:

> bearcat commented: “I don’t know, when I worked on a dairy farm we > would give away bull calves, except the one or two raised as steers every > year to butcher, and an occasional replacement bull raised. Of course we > had Jersey’s and it is difficult to even GIVE Jersey bull ca” >

I’m sorry, I get tired and I don’t explain well. The reason I ask is that I have a lot of old cookbooks, some back to the 1800’s, and they have a lot of recipes for veal and veal bones. I’m working on the theory that there is an economic reason for most things.

It was still more of a Sunday meal to us when I was a child. Frozen chicken became easily available from the store before I was about ten or so here (1970), and soon after that you started to find broiler meat, although it was still relatively expensive, at least compared to what it costs now. But my mother kept buying old hens from nearby small farms well into the late 70’s, I remember going with her when I was small, riding on the bike behind her, and watch as the adults chose some still living one of the hens. And after mother had plucked and cleaned it she’d have to cook it slowly in the oven, in a pot with water, not roast them by themselves like you do with broiler meat, and the end result might still be a bit dry compared to broiler.

Given Foxfier’s point that beef ages and chicken doesn’t (which of course is correct), It’s a wonder that there wasn’t more canned chicken meat before freezers became ubiquitous. My coworker who also has a farm does that with his chickens.

And it’s sunny and warm here, and I got my car working again (next test tomorrow morning, if it starts again I presume I can keep that battery for a few more months – but considering it emptied in only a few hours when the map light was left on I guess I’d better get a new one for next winter) so everything looks good for the moment for me (if you discount that one damn character who keeps wanting to go off on a tangent…).

Hope the same for all of you. Except for the rebellious character, maybe. Although sometimes they really do know better. 🙂

I’d say “happy Easter” but I still can’t hear myself think. Dear choir directors/worship leaders/music ministers/people-who-stand-and-wave-hands-at-musicians: pleasepleaseplease do not put the brass behind the choir. It only encourages both parties to heights and depths of wretched excess and decibel abuse.

Your fouth GIF gave me a chuckle. When I was a kid, we had a Manx cat that apparently never thought I was clean enough, apparently (what boy ever is?). I’d be sitting on the couch, and she’d climb up behind me and start washing my hair with her tongue. If I moved before she was done, she’d grab my head, dig in her claws, and growl at me until I held still so she could finish. Funny cat. Happy Easter!